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Soup to butts. . - Books - The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne, Volume 1: Paintings and Sculpture, 1961-1963 - book review
ArtForum, Sept, 2002 by Arthur C. Danto
ARTHUR C. DANTO ON THE ANDY WARHOL CATALOGUE RAISONNE
The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne, Volume 1: Paintings and Sculpture, 1961-1963. Edited by Georg Frei and Neil Printz. London: Phaidon, 2002. 512 pages, $250.
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AT SOME MOMENT between 1959 and 1961, Andy Warhol underwent an artistic change deep enough to bear comparison to a religious conversion. Before then his work had the effete charm of designer valentines: plump cherubs, posies, pink and blue butterflies, pussycats in confectionary colors, young men with ornamental cocks, and ladies' footwear seemingly designed with fantasists in mind. His images after the change were vernacular, familiar, and anonymous, drawn from the back pages of bluecollar newspapers, the cover pages of sensationalist tabloids, pulp comics, fan magazines, junk mail, publicity glossies, boilerplate from throwaway advertisements. It was as though he had received some commandment to lead the lowest of the pictorial low into the precincts of the highest high art. There were no disclosures or confessions concerning what remains perhaps the most mysterious transformation in the history of artistic creativity. But that is not the whole of it. Warhol went from being what one of Henry James's charact ers calls a "little artist-man," on the fringe of the fringe of the art world, to the defining artist of his era. That could not have happened had the world itself not undergone a parallel change through which the transformed Warhol emerged as the artist it had been waiting for.
A mere fifteen years into the new era, the late Thomas Ammann called for a "comprehensive, scholarly, and authoritative" catalogue raisonne of "all of Andy Warhol's paintings, sculptures, and drawings." This work would accordingly include, together with his juvenilia, the swish drawings for Love Is a Pink Cake, 25 Cats Named Sam and One Blue Pussy, A Ia Recherche du Shoe Perdu, and Wild Raspberries, as well as those for I. Miller shoes that placed Warhol among the most successful commercial artists of the '50s. But a volume containing these early efforts would be unthinkable were it not for the startlingly banal images through which Warhol began revolutionizing artistic consciousness in 1961. So it is appropriate that the first volume of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne should start not at the very beginning but with Paintings and Sculpture, 1961-1963, in which, among other things, one can trace the ascent of commonplace images from the bas-fonds of everyday visual culture to the walls of great museums.
Warhol's first exhibition after the conversion was in a space that belonged by rights to the commercial artist of shoes and pussycats: the Fifty-seventh Street windows of the Bonwit Teller department store in New York. But the paintings on display for one week in mid-April 1961 belong to his new phase. There are five in all. Advertisement is based on a montage of black-and-white newspaper ads: for hair tinting; for acquiring strong arms and broad shoulders; for nose reshaping; for prosthetic aids; and for ("No Finer Drink") Pepsi-Cola. Bonwit's window also included Before and After, advertising the beaky job you were born with transformed into the cute nose of your dreams. The remaining paintings are of Superman, the Little King (on an easel), and Popeye. The ads reflect Warhol's personal preoccupations--impending baldness, an unattractive nose, a loose unprepossessing body. But the placement of such ads--in back-page ad sections of the National Enquirer and comparable publications of mass consumption--testif ies to the universality of nagging self-dissatisfactions and the inextinguishable human hope that there are easy ways to health, happiness, and "Mak[ing] Him Want You." The paintings comment, almost philosophically, on the summer frocks displayed on mannequins in front of them. But the message is lightened by images of comic-book personages with whom everyone was familiar. Who, pausing to look at the display, would have predicted that Advertisement, with which the catalogue raisonne begins, would find a place in Berlin's Nationalgalerie, by way of the museum at Monchengladbach and the capital city's Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fur Gegenwart?
Warhol at first attempted to turn banality into art by means of radical enlargement and by modulating his images with the drips and scumbles of Abstract Expressionist painting: "You can't do a painting without a drip," he told Ivan Karp, among the first of his champions. Both of these mannerisms appear in the Bonwit Before and After and indeed in the prophetic Coca-Cola bottle painting that I had known about only by hearsay when I discussed it as "The Abstract Expressionist Coca-Cola Bottle" in Metamorphoses de la Bouteille de Coca in 1990. The first Campbell's Soup Can painting, of late 1961, still bears the attributes of artistic "authenticity"--red and yellow drips as well as some urgent crayon strokes. But all this protective coloration from the '50s art world disappears in the thirty-two Campbell's Soup Cans legendarily exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, in July and August 1962--perfect examples of handpainted pop images masquerading under the appropriated format of mechanical reproduction.
